Bearing with one another in love – but without a Covenant

Paul wrote (I’m quite a traditionalist on the authorship of Colossians):

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Which is his way of saying some of the things that the Archbishop of Canterbury said in commending the Anglican Covenant. Mutual accountability, and therefore a structure for conversing with each other about new or difficult questions in the church, are surely part of what it means to love one another in the body of Christ.

I doubt if any of those voting against the Covenant in the dioceses of the Church of England were voting against those principles. But as a church, we have now voted against that means of making them concrete – enough among us felt that the Covenant would not in fact deliver the dialogic co-operation that the Archbishop was talking about, but instead be a battleground for groups trying to seize power over others.

So what now? I wonder if we’ve been doing this on to grand a scale – it’s difficult to translate the words of Paul to the Colossians into a document which tries to encompass all the Provinces of the Anglican Communion. At the same time, new triangular relationships have been growing between dioceses of different Provinces, bringing together bishops, clergy and lay people in personal encounter and shared worship. I haven’t (yet) been part of one, but it seems that there the seeds of covenant are growing in a mutual accountability which comes from an understanding of difference along with a common sense of sharing in the same gospel.

It’s not something that can be dictated – but maybe it can be sown. If we can learn to love each other across unresolved differences, then we’re really doing the church’s work.

PS If you’re wondering how I voted: the issue was voted on in Southwark while I was still in London, and in London after I’d moved to Southwark.

 

Outbreak of Christianity!

The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to the Primates of the Anglican Communion (we’ll have to find another name for it, soon, I fear). It is the mark of someone who truly has their vision on the things that matter, that their judgement still proves true when the situation changes. In the light of the disaster in Japan yesterday, it is a sign of the Archbishop’s vision that his letter focuses in part on the crucial importance of the Church’s response to natural disaster. He of course did not know that the earthquake was about to strike. That’s exactly the point; he was able to mention the first news of it in the context of the direction he was already offering to the churches.

Anglican Churches around the world are suffering significant persecution; they are living out – some of the very same churches – the gospel call to be ‘an effective, compassionate presence for the healing of a devastated community’. That is Christianity.

If the Primates of the Communion are to lead us into being that sort of church, the last thing we need to be doing is consuming ourselves in struggles about who is orthodox enough to be included. It is equally an outbreak of Christianity to hear the Archbishop say that ‘The unanimous judgement of those who were present was tha the Meeting should not see itself as a ‘supreme court’, with canonical powers, but that it should nevertheless be profoundly and regularly concerned with looking for ways of securing unity and building relationships of trust’. That is precisely how trust develops – by people meeting together and listening to one another at depth (as we have seen in the report of the continuing indaba of bishops from across the Communion).

It would be a fruitful Lenten discipline – if there is to be a thing called the Anglican Communion with any honesty in the future – for us all to take up the cross of praying for and supporting in their faith those who believe it very differently from ourselves.